Golf, economics and fundamentalist investing

Scottish people will always have trouble getting into heaven because they have tempted humanity with two infamous inventions: golf and economics. They’re trying to make up for it with their whiskey, and doing a pretty good job, but the final judgment is up to someone else.

Golf offers a few lessons that would help economists as investors if they would pay attention. The chief lesson is get back to the fundamentals. Fundamentalism has become a curse word lately, but in Christianity it originally meant one who held to the doctrines of the virgin birth, deity, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that is, the fundamentals of the faith. Fundamentalists were distinguishing their concept of Christianity from the modernists who denied all of the fundamentals but for some strange reason, or out of pure dishonesty, continued to call themselves Christians. Twenty years ago a few journalists intent on advertising their ignorance began misusing the word and today a fundamentalist is the vilest murderer on the planet.

We should rescue the term from ignorant journalists. (Other words need rescuing as well, such as liberal and justice.)Those who practice the fundamentals of any discipline are fundamentalists and the fundamentals are important in most areas of life. In football the fundamentals are blocking and tackling. With investing, fundamental analysis is extremely important. In golf they’re grip and swing, according to the golf masterpiece, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book. Penick recommends revisiting the fundamentals when you’re golf scores suffer from inflation. Are there any fundamentals in economics that could rescue the field from the macro confusion that threatens it today? Yes. The fundamentals of economics are in micro.

Two schools of macroeconomics exist – Austrian and mainstream. But the mainstream world is split between paleo-Keynes, neo-Keynes, monetary and neoclassical. In spite of their common origins, they imitate their socialist counterparts in other fields by fracturing and fighting over insignificant details. All of them pretend that micro doesn’t exist and try to build their systems through correlations of aggregates, such as aggregate demand, aggregate supply, savings, investment, exports, money supply and GDP.

On the other hand, Austrian economics builds up its macro on the certain fundamentals of micro. There are no schools in micro. Micro is just micro because the principles of micro are the most certain in all of economics. No good economist disputes the laws of supply and demand, or diminishing marginal returns, though mainstream macro pretends they don’t exist.

The focus of Austrian economists on the fundamentals has enabled them to craft the best business-cycle model in the field. Mainstream economists are still stuck, after eighty years, with “crap happens!” They call it “shocks,” but it’s the same thing.

So if you find you investing landing in the rough, try getting back to the fundamentals: the market follows profits and profits follow the business cycle, the Austrian business-cycle.

Party like it's 1999

 The lyrics to one of the late Prince’s songs, “Party like it’s 1999,” seem more appropriate today as writers applaud new tech companies. In the late 90s, all an entrepreneur had to do to raise money for an idea was attach the suffix “dot com” to his company name and hot money would rain on him. That enthusiasm for tech stocks drove the NASDAQ to the stratosphere where the lack of oxygen makes people hallucinate. The crash that followed in 2000 punished the dreamers severely.

A similar euphoria is gelling around the fintech, or financial technology, that intends to transform finance. One fintech company is SoFi, a San Francisco based company whose founder claims it will do to banking what Uber has done to taxis. You may have seen its Super Bowl 50 ad, “Great loans for great people.” 

The first Austrian economist - Washington Irving

Washington Irving is best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," but he also wrote many essays. Before he lived by the pen he was a business man and one essay proves that he was a good economist as well. He wrote about the Mississippi Bubble in France of the 1720’s which he published as part of the “Crayon Papers” essays.

At the time Irving wrote this essay, in the 1820’s, there were no good business cycle theories. The most common ideas blamed a shortage of money (gold or silver) or a general overproduction. Say, the French economist, distilled his famous law as part of an effort to debunk the overproduction theory. The Manchester school in England didn’t attempt its explanation until the middle of the nineteenth century and of course Mises didn’t put it all together until early in the twentieth century. Somehow, Washington Irving figured out the essence of the Austrian business cycle theory long before.

Democratic fascism kills growth

Bob Bryan at Business Insider had an interesting column on why economic growth in the US is dying. For the cause, he defers to Mike Thompson of S&P Global Market Intelligence:

Instead of continuing to invest in the business and focus on growing over time, according to Thompson, managements are trying to undercut possible disruptions by showing constant earnings growth and streamlined companies.

This activist-style, short-term attitude is exactly what Blackrock CEO Larry Fink decried in a letter to all S&P 500 CEOs at the start of 2016. Thompson said that these larger firms are most susceptible due to their size.

Revenue growth is predicated on economic growth and innovation,” he said. “We don’t have that sort of economic growth, and, let’s be honest, big companies simply aren’t that innovative. So instead these big companies shift their focus.

Thompson claims that large corporations are doing three things: 1) cutting costs; 2) creating shell companies or doing inversions to reduce taxes; and 3) buying back shares in order to boost earnings per share.

Trucking and profits drive off a cliff

Not long after the 2001 recession I took a job at a large long-haul flatbed trucking company as a rate analyst and one of the first things I noticed on the job was a graph of truck tons/mile. The line grew to the right at a steep grade as a result of Greenspan’s artificial expansion of the economy through money printing in the late 1990s. Then just before the recession, tons/mile drove off a cliff and dived for months until crashing.

Last week, the WSJ reported that “orders for new big rigs plunged and inventories of unsold trucks soared to their highest levels since just before the financial crisis, as uncertainty about future demand and a weak market for freight transportation weighed on truck manufacturers.”

Will we never see another Soros or Buffett?

The Global Guru wrote recently that investing has changed so much over the past two decades that we will never see investors like Buffett and Soros who could earn 30% returns for 30 years.

Nicholas Vardy wrote, “George Soros’ investment track record made him the equivalent of a .400 hitter in baseball.” But then his luck changed:

Soros quietly left the hedge fund scene in 2011, turning his fund into a family office. But his last few years in the game were hardly like his first. Indeed, 2010 was Soros’ worst year since 2002, with his flagship fund up a mere 2.63%. The following year was even worse, with his famed Quantum fund reportedly down 15%.

How mainstream econ promotes socialism

Milton Friedman is a good example of a great champion of free markets whose economics betrayed his philosophy. Few economists enjoyed the ear of the common man in the way Friedman held it. He wrote regularly for popular magazines, appeared on TV talk shows and produced a wonderful documentary series for PBS on the miracles produced by free markets. Yet the mainstream economic theories he championed undermined his speech. Here is how.

The first clue comes from the fact that economists trained in the German historical school , known as socialists of the chair, created the American Economic Association to promote German style socialism in the US. Bismarck, the prime minister in Germany in the late 1800s, had implemented almost all of the socialist agenda by the 1890s in what became known as the “welfare state.” Convinced that Germany was inventing the cutting edge of history, the American economists determined to bring such “progress” home.